November 12 2007
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>Yes...But! Year 8-1
Perhaps President Bush is right after all. Perhaps oil was the right reason to invade Iraq. Bush knows that in the hot sands of the Iraq deserts a quarter of the world’s oil reserves are buried, largely unexplored. He knows that in his home state, Texas his buddies have drilled a million oil wells, where, in Iraq, only 2000 holes have been explored.
Bush knows that America needs oil. It has less than 5 percent of the world’s people, but they use up 25 percent of the world’s black gold.
Yes, the Iraqi invasion was all about oil, a worthy successor to Desert Storm, his father’s war in 1991. Oil War I centered on the Saudi treasures, now quickly draining away. So it made perfect sense to claim Iraq’s untapped wealth. Bush, the son, believes that the American people will thank him on their knees and, in retrospect, will see him as the Modern Day Moses who led his people out from the yoke imposed by OPEC, the Middle East based Organization of Oil Exporting Countries.
And if Iraq is a fiasco, there’s always coal. True, it’s black and dirty, but supposedly there’s enough of the stuff in the USA to last another 200 years or more. No wonder the country is called “The Saudi Arabia of Coal.”
But, says the Energy Watch Group, Peak Coal is only 10-15 years away, because coal reserves have been overstated by as much as 90 percent.
Coal and Oil are not the only resources in short supply. The Water tap, even more important, is increasingly coughing up air, rather than fluids. Much of the American South-East are experiencing dry wells and depleted reservoirs. California’s fires too have been made worse by dry conditions.
And it doesn’t end there. We now have a world-wide cereal shortage, due to ethanol and China’s and India’s rising consumption levels. Combine this with the growing threat of Climate Change which causes too much water in some places and too little in others, and our country Canada has the dubious honors to be the topic of discussion in the secret chambers of the Pentagon and the White House.
These soldiers and politicians are not stupid – well not all the time anyway. They too have noticed that next-door Canada is among the few nations to benefit from Global Warming. That’s good and bad news for us. The bad news is that, where the USA lacks oil, is short of fresh water and will suffer more from the effects of Green House Gases, we, in our home and native land, have plenty of all this stuff, which leads me to conclude that we are destined to be forced to become a colony of the US of America.
To me that makes perfect sense. The continuous fall of the Greenback, and the rise of our currency is a direct result of us possessing water, grain, oil, uranium, gold, all precious commodities the USA lacks.
Our current world crisis in oil and cereals has been creeping up on us for a long time. Even though oil production in ‘absolute’ numbers kept climbing until last year, the production ‘per person’ was not. In 1990 there were 4.5 barrels of oil per capita, by 2000 this had decreased to 4.3 and is now less than 4. It’s even worse for the world’s grain supplies. There the reserves in 2000 were 117 days. It’s now less than 55 days. On top of that we have this ‘Crime Against Humanity’, the use of precious food for fuel, making a ‘from feast to famine’ scenario all the more likely.
Blame our reliance on technology. Some 70 years ago the invention of Freon as a cooling agent made refrigeration possible. Then we discovered that it destroyed the ozone layer. Fortunately the Montreal Protocol successfully combated that threat. Now the so-called Green Revolution of the seventies is revisiting us. Plant breeders then tinkered with the architecture of wheat, rice and corn so that they could be hyper- charged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers. Born was the industrial factory farm and food output tripled. Now diminishing oil and disappearing water makes this impossible.
I now can again visualize the ways my grandfathers operated. My maternal grandparents had a few horses, a dozen cows, a bunch of pigs and a flock of chickens. My Paternal grandparents were grocers. I remember how the grocer –‘opa’ came to the farmer-‘opa’ in his horse-drawn two-wheel cart, where they bartered surplus eggs for coffee, tea and sugar. Will the old become new again?
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